While the current financial crisis has challenged nearly everyone from management to media, it has exposed some fundamental flaws in management pay. In recent years, bonuses have been too high in up-cycles and they now risk being too low in the current downturn. Adopting an investor's...

In this study we experimentally test the impact compensation and wealth (whether given or earned) have on a player's decision to choose a risky investment on the behalf on another player. Using 580 observations from players at Harvard Business School's Computer Laboratory for Experimental...

A challenge faced by many firms is how to encourage managers to undertake risk levels that are compatible with overall firm performance goals. Incentive compensation that is tied to financial returns is a common control mechanism that is meant to induce managers to strive for higher returns...

The discussion on value-based performance measures is centered around the concept of residual income. The main property of residual income is its connection to capital budgeting and the net-present-value-rule. This property is, however, not sufficient to guarantee strong goal congruence between...

Usually financial textbooks present the financial ratio analysis. Many courses are taught in financial analysis and teachers spend lot of efforts teaching how to calculate financial ratios. Most of them are used to analyze historical financial statements. These analyses are very useful in...

In theory, different valuation methods, with consistent assumptions, must give identical results. Numerical examples that purport to illustrate the theory should demonstrate the identical results. Unfortunately, in popular textbooks it is all too easy to find numerical examples that are at odds...

This paper empirically investigates the influence of executive wealth diversification on firm equity granting patterns. Risk-averse, undiversified executives that hold substantial amounts of wealth in the firm, discount the value of their equity holdings, which increases costly risk-sharing and...